This is my last year judging the WOMR poetry contests, both the local and the national contests.  Jose Gouveia, my old friend who started the contests, is very ill and in a lot of pain with a spreading cancer through his gut.  He had to hand off the contest to someone else and things went awry from there.Suffice it to say this person did not understand there were two contests and that the judging is blind.  They also didn’t believe me when I said I had left a week open for the judging and no more starting Friday the first, when Jose had promised me the poems for both contests.  The poems finally came to me Thursday night and I had only that night and the next two days to read all the poems, reread all those that had merit, and make the final choices.  That’s why this blog is late.  For two days I did little but my knee exercises and reading and rereading poems from dawn till I went to bed.Normally I actually enjoy judging poetry contests.  It’s interesting to see what other people are writing – the same as I enjoy reading all the poetry submitted to LILITH.  Nobody prescreens it there so I see every poem that comes in.  The only previous time I suffered through the process was the first time I read poetry for the National Endowment on the Arts.  Now there too the work is pre-screened but when I read for them the first time, 600 mss.arrived. About a week later. 600 more. With the 2nd load, I wept.    Then to my complete and utter despair, 600 more.  I felt totally numb. I did nothing else for a month and a half and for the next five months after that, I could not write a poem.Thursday we went into Boston for my first appointment at Beth Israel since my operation on December 9^th.  We were supposed to go in two weeks earlier, but a foot of snow here and impassible roads made that a joke.  I saw Nikita, the surgeon’s nurse practicioner.  She was delighted with my progress and wished she could show me to other patients.  I see the SURGEON himself I once glimpsed after the operation for 60 seconds  the first week of June when they will do more X-rays [I glow in the dark already] and see how my cyborg knee is working out.I am trying to get into rehab a couple of times a week, but Spaulding is very crowded and I can’t even see anyone for evaluation until the end of February. We’ve had three more snows since I wrote my last blog.  This winter is one for the record books but unfortunately also for those of us impacted by it one hell of an ordeal.  Woody shovels down to the road every time.  My assistant Melenie lives on a road that Truro does not get around to plowing for some time, so she has only gotten in one day a week.  Things are piling up.  The midweek storm turned to rain here and then the temperature dropped, so all of the Outer Cape is covered with a sheet of ice.  I’m pretty much trapped in the house.Back to my own work this week.  I CAN’T BELIEVE IT.  I just looked up from the computer AND IT IS SNOWING AGAIN.  AGAIN.  AGAIN!  Well, I should get a lot done since going anyplace is out of the question.  I need to get back to the book I must hand in by April 16^th; I have promised a poem for an annual; I have to write something for the conference at B.U. THE REVOLUTIONARY MOMENT.  I’m up first so want to do something stirring.  I’m a decent rabble-rouser.  I hope to deliver.  I’m looking forward to seeing old friends there I knew from the movement in New York and elsewhere and to putting faces to many I now only from the internet.  I should be quite mobile by then unless something goes very wrong.  The conference is the 27-29 of March, just before my birthday.It really is snowing again, big flakes.I’m reading NOT WANTED ON THE VOYAGE that my friend Dan recommended to me.  I find it excellent, moving, original.  But I am beginning to feel like Mrs. Noah during the early stages of the flood, except buried by snow instead of water.  We had a drought this summer and fall, so I supposed I should welcome the snow, but enough is quite enough.